Midway swap meet closing

Change is part of face-lift plan for Pacific Highway South

Published 10:00 pm, Tuesday, March 9, 2004

AT THE MIDWAY DRIVE-IN, KENT -- It's mostly arbitrary which things Elgin and Ginger Fuller decide to display each weekend on their tables, set up toward the back of this defunct drive-in theater lot.

"I open a box and say, 'Hey, I haven't seen that in a while,' then put it out here," said Ginger on a recent Saturday morning, standing next to an eclectic collection of what's-its. A troll statue. Thick bangle bracelets. Children's paddleball toys.

At another booth closer to the snack bar, a man demonstrating food processors toggles between English and Spanish. Uno por veinte. One for $20. At another, used car stereos, conspicuously snipped wires coming from their backs, are for sale.

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This scene, presided over by a two-decades-dormant Midway Drive-In movie screen, will cease late this summer, making way for a Lowe's home-improvement store.

The change will displace the region's largest swap meet. It also will alter the face of this stretch of Pacific Highway South.

"Right now, it's a place you drive through. The idea would be to help promote pedestrian uses ... to help develop the area as a destination," said Rick Sepler, a planner and University of Washington lecturer who last year led a team of graduate students that developed an urban design and planning framework for the Midway area. He cautioned about the Lowe's, however, that "if it's the traditional take-a-box-and-drop-it-at-the-back-of-the-lot, it might go to exacerbate the vehicle-orientation of the area."

Cities from Tukwila to Federal Way have in recent years begun to reinvigorate the sections of state Route 99 within their borders. They've added sidewalks, streetlights, landscaping. And they've tried to lure businesses and developers.

Kent even encouraged the Seattle Sounders soccer team to build a stadium atop the old Midway landfill, just south of the drive-in, although that plan has fizzled.

Now, Kent officials hope the Lowe's store will be the first big change to spur others on their share of the road.

"It could be a very positive step in developing that area into more of a boulevard-style road," said police Lt. Bob Holt, who oversees officers who patrol Kent's West Hill, which includes a 40-block stretch of Pacific Highway South.

Holt says the crime comes and goes -- prostitution and drug activity migrates up and down state Route 99. But well-known retailers, such as Lowe's and other stores that will surely sprout up around it, will bring more people to the highway and help to push the crime away from Kent, he hopes.

"It can only be positive," said Mark Miller, vice president of the Los Angeles-based Robertson Properties Group that late last month announced the development plan for the drive-in. "It could encourage other property owners to improve and enhance their own property."

Robertson, a sister company of Pacific Theaters, which owns the Midway Drive-In, has recently redeveloped a handful of dormant drive-ins. It has plans to replace an Auburn drive-in that still shows movies with a mixed-use development.

In urban areas, drive-in theaters are simply not profitable, Miller said. They cannot compete with news multiscreen mega-theaters and, over the years, ended up with second- and third-run movies -- "subtitled monster films," Miller said.

When Pacific Theaters saw many of their drive-ins going the way of the dinosaurs and buggy whips, they encouraged employees to set up swap meets as another way of pulling in money -- a way to pay property taxes and operating expenses and stave off a need to sell the properties.

In 1971, employees of the Midway Drive-In hauled dusty things out of their own garages to start the swap meet here.

Movies haven't flashed across this drive-in's screen for about 20 years. But the weekend swap meet took off.

Highline Community College, whose campus is across the street, uses the drive-in lot for parking during the week. Before the fall quarter, campus officials will have to findabout 300 new spaces -- the amount now used by students and faculty at the drive-in.

Sellers and shoppers here are not concerned with history and highway redevelopment so much as they are with where they will sell their wares.

One chain-smoking man, who preferred not to give his name, said he supplements his Social Security income by selling used VHS movies at the swap meet. Another seller said he put his two sons through college by peddling socks.

For Elgin Fuller, who has set up shop at the Midway Drive-In for -- what is it? 30 years? -- this is something of an addiction.

"I'm a collector. If you're into collectibles or antiques -- if you sit at home for more than three days in a row, you get nervous," he said.

So he comes here and attends antiques shows. This fills up the time, and pays the bills, that his other pastime -- being a clown and magician -- does not.

"I'm too old to get an honest job," 73-year-old Elgin said jokingly.

But that sentiment is felt more seriously by a number of vendors here, who don't know where they will do business come September.

Miller said Robertson Properties is looking for another location in the area for the swap meet. But finding a place with ample parking and a place to put vendors indoors during the winter months is difficult, he said. The drive-in lots are some of the largest available properties in the South King County area.

It leaves the vendors afraid their weekend market, where 75 cents gets you in and $17 buys you a vendor stall, also will go the way of the drive-in.